


i just want the truth, baby

by forsyte



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst and Humor, F/F, Hopeful Ending, Modern Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:54:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22593613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsyte/pseuds/forsyte
Summary: “I am worried,” Alasdair said, sharp, angry, “about you, because you just found out that your sweetheart’s made it her business to hunt people like your friends down and I know, Siobhan, I know that you’re dealing with it by going into crisis mode and deciding whether or not to change your name and flee the country—”“I amnot,”she muttered, thankful that he couldn’t see her search history, “going to flee the country.”
Relationships: Librarian/Her Monster-Hunting Wife Who Keeps Dragging Her Into Wacky Supernatural Adventures
Comments: 5
Kudos: 15
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	i just want the truth, baby

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Measured_Words](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Measured_Words/gifts).



> this is Absolutely Not My Usual Sort Of Fare, so i hope it satisfies! title from I Just Want The Truth, Baby by Born Cages.

On the whole, slipping into the building had probably been a mistake, but in all fairness: Siobhan had forgotten her phone at home, Sylvia had said fifteen minutes and been in there for forty-five, and she’d never technically _said_ that Siobhan had to wait for her outside, just heavily implied it. The hallways were unnervingly well-lit, her footsteps echoed in the silence, and the first corner she turned revealed her wife trapped under a collapsed wall, incongruous with immaculate appearance of the rest of the place. 

  
“Siobhan,” Sylvia said, gratefully, in a voice which sounded like her voice, staring at her with eyes that looked like her eyes, reaching out a hand that was small and slim and—

  
(—nothing like her hands, the hands of the woman Siobhan loved, which were scarred, broad, tipped with nails that were ever-so-slightly pointed.) 

  
“No,” she said, backing away. “You’re not her.” 

  
It was not, on balance, the smartest thing she had ever said, but it had truth going for it. She didn’t know how she knew, exactly, her mind skipping past twins to accept that the thing in front of her was a supernatural mimic. It was easier, maybe, to accept a thing which you saw with your own eyes. (Easier when it made a thousand little things about Sylvia fit together at last, the final gear clicking into place and the clockwork coming alive with movement.)

  
“What do you mean?” asked the thing which was not Sylvia, frowning. It shifted, the pile of rubble atop it weighing it down, and winced, an expression that sat strangely on her wife’s face, grey with dust and splotched, here and there, with blood so red it looked unreal in the fluttering light of the headache-inducing fluorescents. “Siobhan, it’s me. Please—” she broke off with a noise of pain. “Please help me, this hurts.” Blood so black it looked unreal coated her face, dripped down between her teeth. It had been red a second ago, thought Siobhan, idiotically, staring down at what might have been a monster and what might have been her wife. Blood wasn’t black, not while it was still liquid; something about oxidation, about red blood cells. Octopi had blue blood, she remembered foggily, hemocyanin, copper-rich. 

  
Focus, she thought. 

  
The thing had blood which looked black when it wasn’t paying attention, or else it had no blood at all and it wasn’t injured. The rubble looked real enough, but she couldn’t trust her senses. It hadn’t killed her yet, so it liked playing with its prey, or else it needed her to accept an agreement of some sort. A contract. The sort of situation you’d find in old folklore, which meant the sort of situation she’d doomed herself to, apparently, by marrying Sylvia and getting caught up in the whole wild mess that constituted her life. Not that it would have made a difference, really, not that she would have said no to the proposal, to moving in with her, to the first coffee date, for God’s sake, but it would have been nice to know about this.

  
_11 Signs Your Significant Other Is Secretly A Monster Hunter,_ she thought to herself, and had to clap her own hands over her mouth to muffle the sudden burst of laughter, loud and shocking in the abandoned halls.

  
“Siobhan,” said the thing, again,

  
(—or was it for the first time? she wasn’t sure, suddenly—)

  
standing, reaching for her, concern in the crinkle of her brow and the angle of her mouth. Her teeth were wrong—its teeth were wrong, too blunt in places and too sharp in others. Siobhan took a quick step back and wondered if running would be an invitation to chase. There was no dust on the thing’s face (should there have been?). The floor was immaculate, shining in the fluttering light of the fluorescents, freshly-waxed, and there was no rubble on it, because it was an office building, of course there wasn’t rubble, and she was trespassing after hours, the feeling of being somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be pounding against her ribs, and her wife was here to pick her up,

  
but she couldn’t have been, because Siobhan drove here and they only owned one car between the two of them and Sylvia didn’t like driving. Siobhan had a headache, all of a sudden, from the lights,

except she’d never gotten headaches from fluorescents, and the thing standing in front of her was not her wife, and as it moved toward her the fear simmering in the back of her mind screamed at her to run like it was the only possible course of action left to take. 

  
So she did. 

  
She didn’t expect gunshots to ring out behind her, followed by a scream of pain that crawled into her skull and tried to levy her head open with a crowbar, but on the whole it wasn’t too surprising. It was shaping up to be one of those days.

**  
  
*****  
  
  


“I just wish you had told me,” Siobhan said, wincing at Sylvia's not-so-tender ministrations. "Jesus, that stings." 

  
"Antiseptic does that," Sylvia answered distractedly. The paste she had produced from her ragged backpack and was smearing over the ring of torn-up skin around Siobhan's wrist, the one souvenir of her frantic headlong sprint away from the thing in the office building, gleamed charcoal-black in the overhead light and smelled like dubious plant matter. “Sorry. You weren’t supposed to go in.”

  
"Antiseptic," Siobhan said flatly. 

  
"Of a sort." Sylvia released her wrist. "Careful. If that drips it’ll stain the seats. The magical theory behind it is complex, and I don't know if I can explain it properly—" 

  
"Give me the CliffNotes version, then.”

  
"You know how activated charcoal is used to absorb poison? It's like that."

  
Siobhan opened her mouth to make some joke about — the stupid activated charcoal ice cream they'd been riffing on a couple days back, and the magic version thereof, maybe, and then something about the situation hit her and she closed her mouth and sat there, shuddering. Sylvia wrapped an arm around her, leaning awkwardly across the center console, and together they sat (too long, not long enough) until Siobhan could compose herself. 

  
“Let’s go,” Sylvia said, softly. Siobhan nodded, blank-faced again, breathing deep and even, and Sylvia peeled out of the parking lot at her usual heart-stopping speed, leaving the abandoned office building behind them. The lights in the windows flickered, Siobhan noticed with a detached interest, and as soon as the sedan passed the first cross-street they all went out. Ten out of ten for atmosphere, she thought. Would almost die here again. 

  
Halfway home, Sylvia fiddled with the radio, flipped between three different late-night car advertisements, and turned it off again. “So,” she said, and Siobhan braced herself. “This is going to be a long shot, but you’re familiar with the concept of a doppelganger, yeah?” 

  
“Kill your double.”

  
Sylvia snorted. “Something like that. So, first of all, hi, I’m Sylvia Wilson, and monsters are real, and I spend a lot of my free time hunting them down.” 

  
  
*******

  
  
“Doppelgangers aren’t real.”

  
Siobhan dug her fingers into her face as if that would ward off the impending stress headache. “You know, some people say that about vampires.” 

  
Alasdair slurped the dregs of his oversugared abomination and tossed the cup towards the trash. They both watched as it bounced off and rolled across the floor, a few drops of coffee splashing onto the carpet. Siobhan felt her eye twitch. 

  
“Point,” he sighed, levering himself out of his sprawl as if it physically pained him to do so and trudging over to properly dispose of his trash. “But no one’s reported anything like this for, what, centuries? How do you know it wasn’t some other shapeshifter?” 

  
She took a deep breath, ticked off the points on her fingers. “One, it didn’t shift into anything else, at least not visibly. There’s no other variety of shifter that can copy another’s human guise and retain it, as far as I can tell from my research. Two, it was messing with my mind the whole time, which leads me to three, it wasn’t a real shifter, just an illusionist—looking at it too hard gave me a headache, and that doesn’t happen around the shifters I’ve encountered. I still don’t know if the wall was actually collapsed or not. That’s not normal, and don't try to tell me that it is—” 

  
“Okay, okay, yeah, got it, yeah,” said Alasdair hastily, cutting her off. “You’ve done your research, I believe you.” He hesitated. “So… what now?” 

  
She collapsed forward onto the table, let her cheek rest against the cool plastic surface. “I don’t know.” 

  
“I mean, your wife hunts things like me down for fun and for profit, and you’re doing your best to research and protect us—how’s that going for you?” 

  
The table was flimsy and too smooth. She found herself missing her own wooden furniture. “Mm. She doesn’t know about me, I don’t think. I told her I moderate a couple of forums in my spare time and she generally leaves me alone when she sees me typing furiously, and when she gave me the Talk,” she laughed a little, “I was too… in shock, I suppose, to do much other than nod along.” 

  
“That wasn’t…” Alasdair paused. “Do you… talk to each other?” 

  
“Wouldn’t marry someone I couldn’t talk to.” 

  
“That wasn’t a yes.”

  
“Yes,” she sighed, “yes, I talk to my wife, every day, about anything that comes to mind, and she does the same. Why do you ask.” 

  
“Oh, for—" he cut himself off, slid one hand over his eyes, dropped it again. "Because this is going to kill you if you let it." 

  
He was uncharacteristically serious. Not quite knowing how to respond, she fell back on irritation. “Alasdair, it’s fine, I’m not going to break in half or anything or anything. You don’t have to be worried—”

  
“I am worried,” he said, sharp, _angry,_ “about you, because you just found out that your sweetheart’s made it her business to hunt people like your friends down and I know, Siobhan, I know that you’re dealing with it by going into crisis mode and deciding whether or not to change your name and flee the country—” 

  
“I am _not,_ ” she muttered, thankful that he couldn’t see her search history, “going to flee the country.”

  
“—when what you need to do is talk to someone about it. Specifically, your wife.” 

  
“Ah,” said Siobhan, the kind of noise one makes when one realizes one’s friend is apparently suicidal.

  
“Don’t look at me like that,” he snapped. “I’ve met Sylvia, and she hasn’t tried to kill me, so either she’s inexperienced at recognizing the signs, in which case she’d benefit from your vast body of information—”

  
“ _—um_ ,” 

  
“ _—and_ from you telling her that most of us don’t go around killing people, or she’s already erudite enough to make that judgement call herself, in which case you have nothing to fear.”

He made it sound so easy. 

  
“It’s not easy,” he continued, his tone softening, anger shading into sympathy. “But it’s the best option.” 

  
She didn’t have much to say to that. She doubted he’d accept the possibility of the worst case scenario. “Alright.”

  
Alasdair rolled his eyes in the way that seemed to require his whole head to move. It was comforting, somehow, to watch him indulging in dramatics. “Thank you, Alasdair,” he said, “for your magnanimous free advice, time and time again, thank you, I owe you my survival, I would have died in a ditch without you.” 

  
“I’m telling Sylvia to stake you,” she informed him, and he cackled, high and ridiculous, and a smile insinuated itself across her face, entirely of its own volition. 

  
“Come on,” he said, holding out a hand. “Pity party’s over, we have children to hush.” 

  
“You’ve never told a child to quiet down in your life,” she said, and let him pull her up. “Or death, for that matter.” 

  
“First time for everything,” he answered, and gave her an ironic salute before sauntering out to the check-out desk. 

  
She watched him for a moment more, as he affected a casual lean, and breathed, inhale-pause-exhale, centering herself, putting away her thoughts for later, and then turned back to her filing work. She didn’t have to think about this now. 

  
  
*******  
  
  


Sylvia locked the door of their apartment behind them, started sorting through the takeout box. “What did you have to talk to me about?”

  
She should have thought about this earlier. 

  
“Um.” She leaned against the wall, took off her shoes, arranged them neatly on the floor next to Sylvia’s work boots. “The thing we saw the other night.” She knew what she had to say, but it wouldn’t reach her mouth. Tell the truth, she reminded herself, and not just the technical kind. 

  
Sylvia relaxed. “Don’t worry about it, okay?” Her voice was tender. Soft, like she was soothing a spooked animal. “Those things are rare, and they stick to their territories. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have gotten you involved in my work.” 

  
“No,” said Siobhan’s traitorous mouth. “No, you shouldn’t have.” 

  
“I’m sorry,” Sylvia said again, halting, reaching out, then pulling back, as if she wasn’t sure whether to touch Siobhan or not. None of this was right. None of this was going right. “I didn’t—I wanted to keep you away from it, I wanted to keep you safe—”

  
“Lack of knowledge is not safety,” Siobhan snapped, and then shut her mouth, eyes hot, furious at herself, furious at Sylvia, none of this was going right, and Sylvia was curling around herself, wounded, hands twisting in the fabric of her shirt, and she didn’t know that Siobhan already knew, she thought she was alone.

  
Lack of knowledge was not safety. 

  
She looked at the floor, took a deep breath, let it out, inhale-pause-exhale, tried to center herself. Tried to restart. “Hey, Sylvia,” she said. “I’m Siobhan, and monsters are real, and I spend a lot of my free time trying to help them.”

  
(After a brief silence, she risked a glance up. Sylvia had straightened up, was staring at her as if seeing her for the first time. 

  
“Not the ones that kill people for fun,” she added, belatedly.

  
“Oh thank fuck,” said Sylvia all in a rush, bonking her head lightly against the wall as she relaxed. 

  
“Just,” Siobhan went on, “the— the benign vampires, the shifters who want a safe place to change. That sort of thing. I just, I need you to know that there are things out there that aren’t human and they don’t all need to die.” She couldn’t look up again, traced the grain of the floorboards with her eyes and waited. 

  
“Okay,” was Sylvia’s answer, a few seconds later. She sounded unsure. Anticipatory. Her left hand came into Siobhan’s field of vision, palm-up—broad, scarred, tipped with slightly pointed nails and boasting a single titanium ring, plain and practical and beautiful. “Tell me about them, then?”

  
Siobhan reached out and took it. “Yeah,” she said, and then again, something buoyant in her chest, “yeah, I will.")

  
  
("...Maybe after dinner, though.”

  
Sylvia's reply, somewhere between amused and resigned: “You pick the worst times to have these conversations, you know."

  
“You love me anyway.”

  
“I love you even when you clip your toenails in the bathroom and don’t clean them up.”

  
“That happened _one time_.” 

  
“One time too many, Siobhan.”)

**Author's Note:**

> nghk. "interesting relationship dynamics/complicated power dynamics" is a very open-ended sort of prompt, and excruciatingly difficult for me to write outside the context of an existing property. i had fun writing this, at least, but i'm not sure it actually fulfills any of the requester's, well, requests! nonetheless I Tried.


End file.
